Thursday, December 04, 2008

(I am posting early this week since I will be on vacation and away from home until late next week.)

This Thanksgiving I was discussing the idea of technological progress with my father. I asked him if he had ever heard the term "singularity." He recognized the word had something to do with physics, but did not know any meaning that related to our discussion of technology. Then, he went on to describe a view of technology that seemed strikingly similar to that espoused by believers in the so-called "technological singularity," a speed-up in the rate of technological change so immense that it would constitute a third revolution in human history alongside the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

But his explanation had a twist. He thought it very likely that this technological progress would result in the destruction of human civilization and perhaps all life on the planet within a century. Alas, he didn't see any way to stop it.

The idea that the advance of technology is speeding up is not a new one. And, the idea that technological progress may actually be putting us on a path to destruction precisely because we don't know when enough is enough has a long history as well. But perhaps the most pernicious idea of the three my father mentioned is that nothing can be done to stop it.

I was struck by how deeply the idea of inevitable, unstoppable, rapid technological progress had become ingrained in the culture. If my father--who reads a lot, but is not particularly versed in things scientific or technological--could describe this idea and its possible consequences in such great detail, then it must indeed have made its way into the minds of nearly every thinking and perhaps many nonthinking persons.

The effect of this idea has been threefold. First, the vast majority of people regard technological progress as an unalloyed blessing. Of course, they are, in part, confusing the availability of cheap energy to run the technology with the technology itself. Without cheap energy much of that technology would not be available to the masses. And, we would not have been able to build the necessary infrastructure nor been able to put the necessary number of people to work to develop so many new technologies.

Second, many people are also discounting the ill effects. If someone had told you at the beginning of the 20th century that the automobile would become ubiquitous in American life, that it would lead to tens of thousands of fatalities and countless injuries each year, that it would be a major cause of urban decline, that it would make our country dangerously dependent on foreign oil imported from the most politically unstable parts of the world, and that it would be a large contributor to climate change, would you not have joined a campaign to ban it? Yet, even today most people are largely blind to or at least have little concern about these clearly deleterious effects.

Third, faith in technology turns most people into citizen-couch potatoes. Since technology will fix everything, we'll put the technologists in charge and then sit back and wait for the miracles to arrive.

The persistence and depth of this conviction results not from the available evidence, but rather from a pseudo-religious belief in the innate goodness of technological progress. Ray Kurzweil, the high priest of the singularity idea, tells us in his tome, "The Singularity is Near," that humans have become joined to machines in their cultural evolution. So far, this is not news. Human ecologist William Catton Jr. made the same point in his 1980 book, "Overshoot," where he refers to human beings as homo colossus, a man-tool hybrid of extraordinary destructive power.

But Kurzweil goes on to say that evolution creates better solutions to the problems of survival, and that technological evolution as part of overall evolution inevitably makes humans more fit for survival. This, he says, is the necessary progression of the universe. That's not exactly what the original evolutionist, Charles Darwin, thought. Changes in living organisms are due to random mutations that are just that, changes. They do not have a purpose per se. The natural world simply sorts through these experiments (including presumably any human technological inventions), keeping the ones which make animals and plants more fit and discarding the ones that don't. Since this sorting takes place over many generations and sometimes many millennia, there is no good way to tell ahead of time what will work and what won't.

So, Kurzweil's faith that our technology will make us more fit for survival in the universe is, in reality, a religious view, not a scientific one. To be fair, Kurzweil does acknowledge many potential dangers from new technologies such as genetic research, nanotechnology and robotics. But he believes we can mitigate or eliminate those dangers with proper regulation.

First, the natural world is so complex that environmental education giant David Orr believes we will never solve the knowledge problem. For everything we learn about the natural world and how to manipulate it, we create an equal and consequential void of ignorance concerning the effects of our actions. When it came to chlorofluorocarbons--a set of chemicals used in refrigerators and spray cans--we almost found out too late that they were eating a hole in the ozone. Given our countless industrial and technological processes, we simply cannot know all their effects on our biosphere.

Second, those effects might be so severe that they could wipe out human civilization. Bill Joy, formerly the chief scientist for Sun Microsystems, wrote a widely read article for Wired back in 2000 about just such possibilities. The article entitled "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" details the possibilities for the dissemination of designer viruses with the power to kill selectively, self-replicating nanobots that devour the world, and robotic intelligence too great for us to understand or control. The problems may seem like something out of science fiction, but at least the designer viruses and the self-replicating nanobots are in principle possible. Robotic intelligence that mimics and outpaces human intelligence is still just a dream. And, many debate whether such a thing is even possible. But if it were to come to pass, it would have enormous consequences, not all of them salutary for the human race or the biosphere.

Finally, there is the perception that technological progress is speeding up. But is it? After one hundred years, we are still dependent on the internal combustion engine for almost all of our land and much of our sea transportation. We were promised miracle cures for genetic diseases a decade ago, but they haven't arrived. After a half a century of research, we expected fusion reactors to be in place. But the latest international project promises to bring us commercial fusion power only by the mid-21st century. In truth, it is not altogether clear that we will ever be able to master fusion energy. Our main fuels by far remain fossil fuels, 86 percent by energy content. And, these fuels are heading toward depletion faster than anyone anticipated as the world economy and population grow, and as more and more people want access to high-energy lifestyles.

In reality, technology sometimes progresses in fits and starts, and sometimes not at all. Joseph Tainter, author of "The Collapse of Complex Societies," suggests that we may have reached an era of diminishing returns for technology and for the complexity it fosters. Complexity, Tainter explains, can increase the power and reach of a civilization. But increasing complexity will also eventually have diminishing and even negative returns to a society thereby endangering its very cohesiveness. He cites Roman and Mayan civilizations as examples.

An aura of inevitability surrounds the idea of technological progress. And, that aura implies meaningful progress for human society as well. But is that aura in reality merely a paralyzing agent that prevents careful examination of technology and its claims for the future? Humans have, in fact, stopped, slowed or restricted technology on a few occasions. Whether wisely or not, the nuclear power industry was essentially stopped in its tracks after the accident at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979. The public wanted other solutions.

We should want other solutions now, too. Technology enthusiasts claim that new as yet created technologies will keep human society overflowing with the cheap energy it needs for the energy-hungry technological wonderworld of the future. And, yet despite all our new technology, oil discoveries continue to fall. Geology is remorseless and doesn't yield to mere faith in technology. The development of alternatives is lagging far behind our need for quick replacements. The effects of climate change are visiting us sooner than even the most pessimistic estimates had presumed.

The singularitarians tell us, "Just wait! The great breathtaking exponential acceleration of technological progress is about to begin and will play out over the next few decades." The new technologies that will emerge will solve the problems of energy supply, clean water, hunger, and even climate change. And, they will also lead to much greater longevity and far better human health.

But as the world hurtles toward peak oil, catastrophic climate change, widespread water shortages and further vast destruction of the biosphere, can we afford to wait for the singularity to arrive? Or do we need to be pragmatic and start addressing these issues now as well as we can, not just with our technology, but with a plan to change the very way in which we live to make our presence more consonant with the limits of the Earth?

Ha! Ha!Lousy odograph evangelizing again on "reverse Black Swans", have hope folks, luck is just around the corner!The trouble with singularitarians is that they have zero understanding of entropy and energy dependence, they assume that miraculous growth comes out of thin air and "intelligence".But what does intelligence needs to show up?A mechanism to grind out "ideas" which requires collateral energy for its operation and information sources as the raw material of "thinking", neither comes for free nor are "a given", even for purely analytical developments as in mathematics, see The Limits of Reason.So, shove this ridiculous tech religion where it belongs.

we seem to consistently overplay the physical effects of new technology in our imaginations while underplaying the social effects. I'll be interested to see if social connectivity continues to increase; a world with no fundamentally new technology but an increase in connectivity might be more different than you'd expect.

Well, regardless of what we may think of "the singularity," it's either going to happen or it isn't. As I understand Mr. Kurzweil and his adherents, it's not something we have any say over - sort of like the rapture.

The singularity is just another in a long line of stories relating to mythical lands. Utopia (which means 'noplace'), Shangra-La, El Dorado, the New Jerusalem, the promised land, the city on a hill, New York, New Amsterdam, New Orleans, New Jersey, the voyage of the Pilgrims, the march of the Mormons, the migrations of pirates, pillagers, Huns and barbarians, and any other number of communes, cults, hippy communities, splinter groups, reformations, workers paradises, gold paved cities, eco villages, chartered companies, wagon trains and what have you. The singularity is just another expression of people who are not content where they currently live thinking it will be paradise just over the horizon.

The last time I wrote to you was 03/18/2001, "Comments on "The Singularityis Near", so a lot has changed in the world since then. Still, I thinksome parts of your argument have not adapted as much as needed along thelines I suggested then. :-)

I just wrote this about your 2005 book and I send you the firstcopy. Essentially, I suggest that while you are right in presenting thetrends leading up to the singularity, ultimately your view of what shouldbe done as we approach it and afterwards is more a result of the mirroreffect of the singularity reflecting your own unacknowledged currentpersonal biases in a quasi-Republican/Libertarian direction. The mostproductive response to the singularity may come from a very differentperspective -- that of a return to the gift economy ideals of mosthunter/gatherer societies, as exemplified by GNU/Linux these days.

Good luck with your next book if there is one, and maybe you'll hear fromme again then (another six years? :-)

All the best.

--Paul Fernhout

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It is hard to improve on the first spotlight review of this book by RobertDavid Steele at Amazon:http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Biology/dp/0670033847http://www.amazon.com/gp/discussionboard/discussion.html/ref=cm_rdp_st_rd/002-3072141-3270460?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0670033847&store=yourstore&cdThread=TxSKBB34MU2RN1&reviewID=R794OJ10SAPU4&displayType=ReviewDetail#wasThisHelpfulbut I will try.

One of the curious things about Raymond Kurzweil is that he has nobackground in evolutionary biology, yet he talks a lot about "evolution".By itself, that is not a problem; lots of people become knowledgeable inmultiple disciplines and in cross-discipline connections. But his writingalso does not even seem to show an understanding of even just the best ofthat popular literature related to it (e.g. Stephen J. Gould's work).Gould is in the index in a few places, but not as I can see as a majorthread of argument anywhere -- more to make a few technical points.Somehow I feel if Kurzweil had a greater appreciation for evolutionarybiology, the tone of his book might be quite different.

Kurzweil's perspective on life and politics presumably derives from beinga self-made captain of industry in the capitalist USA -- having made afortune producing sophisticated computer equipment and related software nodoubt through a lot of cleverness and hard work. In the USA, historicallythat position in society generally implies adopting aRepublican/Libertarian militaristic and market-driven perspective, if forno other reason than to get along easily with peers and to do well in themarketplace. But also, for the few percent who succeed at the Americandream (unlike the masses of failures) he can look back at his experience,and perhaps ignoring luck or help from others, claim his success was dueto his own choices, and if others just made similar good choices, they toowould be successful. It is like a millionaire lottery winner exhortingeveryone to play the lottery. As an expert in statistics though, Kurzweilshould, if self-reflective, be able to see some statistical problems withthis viewpoint. Who would be the workers to be bossed around if everyonewas a successful as him? And how would his products command a pricepremium if everyone was making such things? Clearly such a society ofuniversal success would need to be fundamentally different than the onewhich produced his own personal success.

Also, Kurzweil made his money in control of patents and copyrights andmust presumably strongly believe in the value of their role in controllingresources to create artificial scarcity to justify his own financialsuccess. Thus, for example, he laments the problems of the commercialmusic industry in the USA in enforcing scarcity of the product ofmusicians they control under contract, while he ignores the rise ofuncontracted individuals more easily producing their own garage band musicand the blossoming of a world of personal and private media production.

One would expect anyone's personal experience to color his or herprojections for the future and what the best public policy would be inrelation to those projections. That is a given. But it is the failure toacknowledge this that the most harm can be done.

To grossly simplify a complex subject, the elite political and economicculture Kurzweil finds himself in as a success in the USA now centersaround maintaining an empire through military preparedness and preventivefirst strikes, coupled with a strong police state to protect accumulatedwealth of the financially obese. This culture supports market drivenapproaches to supporting the innovations needed to support thismilitarily-driven police-state-trending economy, where entrepreneurs arekept on very short leashes, where consumers are dumbed down via compulsoryschooling, and where dissent is easily managed by removing profitableemployment opportunities from dissenters, leading to self-censorship.Kurzweil is a person now embedded in the culture of the upper crusteconomically of the USA's military and economic leadership. So, one mightexpect Kurzweil to write from that perspective, and he does. His solutionsto problems the singularity pose reflect all these trends -- frompromoting first strike use of nanobots, to design and implementationfacilitated through greed, to widespread one-way surveillance of thepopulace by a controlling elite.

But the biggest problem with the book _The Singularity Is Near: WhenHumans Transcend Biology_ is Kurzweil seems unaware that he is doing so.He takes all those things as given, like a fish ignoring water, ignoringthe substance of authors like Zinn, Chomsky, Domhoff, Gatto, Holt, and soon. And that shows a lack of self-reflection on the part of the book'sauthor. And it is is a lack of self-reflection which seems dangerouslyreckless for a person of Kurzweil's power (financially, politically,intellectually, and persuasively). Of course, the same thing could be saidof many other leaders in the USA, so that he is not alone there. But oneexpects more from someone like Ray Kurzweil for some reason, given hisincredible intelligence. With great power comes great responsibility, andone of those responsibilities is to be reasonably self-aware of ones ownhistory and biases and limitations. He has not yet joined the small butgrowing camp of the elite who realize that accompanying the phase changethe information age is bringing on must be a phase change in powerrelationships, if anyone is to survive and prosper. And ultimately, thatmeans not a move to new ways of being human, but instead a return to oldways of being human, as I shall illustrate below drawing on work byMarshall Sahlins.

The first part of the book on trends is largely accurate and in agreementwith other writers on the subject of the singularity. But is has twoglaring exceptions which are commonly overlooked by other authors writingin the transhumanist literature -- ignoring the likely happiness ofprevious generations and ignoring complexities related to life expectancycalculations.

Kurzweil's writing seems uninformed by the writings by Marshall Sahlins on"The Original Affluent Society"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_societyhttp://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.htmlIt is suggested by Sahlins that a lot of hunter/gather societies involvedlittle "work" as we might term it, and a lot of real "happiness" as peopleengaged in interesting activities and socializing. People in agrariansocieties and industrial societies generally were sicker and unhappierthan hunter/gatherers, at least in the early to middle part of thosesocieties. Later social forces emerge allowing the populace to control theexcesses of the elites (e.g. feudal paternalism, OSHA). Sahlins is in theindex, but he is just quoted by another author being quoted on anunrelated topic.

Also Kurzweil ignores the complicating factor of infant mortality in hiscalculations of life expectancy. If people in an older society lived pastage five, they might live quite long, to 70 or so -- but if 50% of youngchildren might perish this would produce a low average life expectancy. Ingeneral, the evolutionary "grandmother hypothesis" suggest selectivepressure on humans for survival to the age of grand parent or great grandparent will help increase the rate of survival of grandchildren and greatgrand children, by being able to pass on accumulate knowledge to offspringat the parenting stage. And it also suggests why death through a suddenheart attack at an advanced age before mental faculties start to failmight also be an adaptive response. It is quite possible most adults ofhunter/gatherer societies lived in good health into their 60s, 70s, 80s,and beyond -- and may have had a surprising youthfulness and vitalitycompared to present day human specimens. This may have made the work ofanthropologists difficult in estimating the life expectancy of ourancestors. Also, infant mortality of hunters and gathers is in part due tothe rise of cities as breeding grounds for germs, so high infant mortalityof, say, native Americans in contact with western invaders with near 95%mortality to each of several waves of disease (smallpox, measles, etc.)does not necessarily reflect historic trends for that population goingback thousands of years. Yet, rather than diminish industrialization asthe creation of disease, Kurzweil celebrates it while ignoring theinternal selection for resistance to those diseases which went on forgenerations at great personal cost. (See for example the book, _Guns,Germs and Steel_).

One of the biggest problems as a result is Kurzweil's view of humanhistory as incremental and continual "progress". He ignores how oursociety has gone through several phase changes in response to continuinghuman evolution and increasing population densities: the development offire and language and tool-building, the rise of militaristic agriculturalbureaucracies, the rise of industrial empires, and now the rise of theinformation age. Each has posed unique difficulties, and the immediateresult of the rise of militaristic agricultural bureaucracies orindustrialism was most definitely a regression in standard of living formany humans at the time. For example, studies of human skeleton size,which reflect nutrition and health, show that early agriculturists wereshorter than preceding hunter gathers and showed more evidence of diseaseand malnutrition. This is a historical experience glossed over byKurzweil's broad exponential trend charts related to longevity which jumpsfrom Cromagnon to industrial era. Yes, the early industrial times ofDickens in the 1800s were awful, but that does not mean the precedingtimes were even worse -- they might well have been better in many ways.This is a serious logical error in Kurzweil's premises leading to logicalproblems in his subsequent analysis. It is not surprising he makes thismistake, as the elite in the USA he is part of finds this fact convenientto ignore, as it would threaten the whole set of justifications related to"progress" woven around itself to justify a certain unequal distributionof wealth. It is part of the convenient ignorance of the implicationsthat, say, the Enclosure acts in England drove the people from the landand farms that sustained them, forcing them into deadly factory workagainst their will -- an example of industrialization creating the verypoverty Kurzweil claims it will alleviate.

As Marshall Sahlins shows, for most of history, humans lived in a gifteconomy based on abundance. And within that economy, for most food orgoods people families or tribes were mainly self-reliant, drawing from anabundant nature they had mostly tamed. Naturally there were many tribeswith different policies, so it is hard to completely generalize on thistopic -- but certainly some did show these basic common traits of thatlifestyle. Only in the last few thousand years did agriculture andbureaucracy (e.g. centered in Ancient Egypt, China, and Rome) come todominate human affairs -- but even then it was a dominance from afar and aregulation of a small part of life and time. It is only in the last fewhundred years that the paradigm has shifted to specialization and aneconomy based on scarcity. Even most farms 200 years ago (which was where95% of the population lived then) were self-reliant for most of theiritems judged by mass or calories. But clearly humans have been adapted,for most of their recent evolution, to a life of abundance and gift giving.

When you combine these factors, one can see that Kurzweil is right formost recent historical trends, with this glaring exception, but then showsan incomplete and misleading analysis of current events and future trends,because his historical analysis is incomplete and biased.

Further, Kurzweil repeatedly talks about evolution, but seems to have atbest a view of evolution informed by the worst of popular sources. Noprofessional evolutionary biologist would say something implying evolutionis the same as progress, for example. Or that evolution is always aboutincreasing complexity. Consider something like a host/parasite interactionacross multiple generations in simulation. You may actually see cycles,where resistance to a parasite is developed, the parasite overcomes thatas it too evolves, then the host population evolves in new directions tocreate new resistances while losing the original resistance, which theparasite may lose its ability to overcome, only to see the entire cyclerepeated when the host reinvents the defense and the parasite reinventsthe way around it. It takes energy and mass to keep a memory of pastinnovations encoded in RNA or DNA or other means, and evolutionarily thatis often just excess baggage slowing down reproduction. There may be somelimited controversy on this topic if you consider a bacterial pool ofgenetic information capable of storing an immense amount of geneticinformation in a distributed fashion and so able to save novel code forvarious enzyme pathways and so perhaps ratchet up a store of usefulgenetic information, but Kurzweil admits to no notion of controversy onevolution being linked to progress.

A study of the fossil record would show the repeated loss of large numbersof species with various clever adaptations, and how often a single generalspecies (like the stickleback) will radiate into a variety of specializespecies which seem to eclipse the generalist, but then with some suddenshock to the environment, the numerically vastly superior specializedvariants are all wiped out, leaving sometimes the generalist ancestor, andsometimes nothing. (See the work of evolutionary biologist Axel Meyer.)

I think if Kurzweil studied more evolutionary biology from theprofessional literature, he would not have a rosy view of things like,say, uploading your brain in a digital world. It is, frankly, naive tothink that an uploaded brain derived from duplicating a clunky chemicalarchitecture would compete with the populations of digital organisms whichmight evolve native to a digital context. In short, those uploaded brainsare going to be eaten alive by digital piranha that overwrite theircomputer memory and take over their runtime processor cycles. It has takenevolution billions of years to lead up to the mammalian immune system, yetKurzweil seems to thing an effective digital immune system or nanobotimmune system can be developed in a few years. More likely the result willbe ages of chaos and suffering until co-evolutionary trends emerge. Butthat would be in line with the other phase changes and their effect ofmost human lives when militaristic agricultural bureaucracies emerged, orwhen industrial empire building emerged. These evolutionary factors existeven for the current elite if they uploaded themselves. So, the onlyalternative may be to avoid building such a competitive landscape into thedigital world. as much as possible -- and likely that will involvereducing the competitiveness of those building the digital world driventhrough short term greed. It is almost as either we all go together intothe digital world in a reasonable level peace and prosperity or no onegoes for long. And it is time we need in a digital world to adapt to it --perhaps even as much as a second gained from a peaceful digital worldmight be all it takes to ensure humanities survival of the singularity.And that perhaps one second of peaceful runtime then needs to be boughtnow with a lot of hard work making the world a better place for more people.

So, this would suggest more caution approaching a singularity. And itwould suggest the ultimate folly of maintain R&D systems motivated byshort term greed to develop the technology leading up to it. But it isexactly such a policy of creating copyright and patents via greed that(the so called "free market" where paradoxically nothing is free) thatKurzweil exhorts us to expand. And it is likely here where his own successmost betrays him -- where the tragedy of the approach to the singularityhe promotes will results from his being blinded by his very great previouseconomic success. If anything, the research leading up to the singularityshould be done out of love and joy and humor and compassion -- with aslittle greed about it if possible IMHO. But somehow Kurzweil suggests thesame processes that brought us the Enron collapse and war profiteeringthrough the destruction of the cradle of civilization in Iraq are the sameones to bring humanity safely thorough the singularity. One pundit, Iforget who, suggested the problem with the US cinema and TV was that therewere not enough tragedies produced for it -- not enough cautionary talesto help us avert such tragic disasters from our own limitations and pride.

Kurzweil's rebuttals to critics in the last part of the book primarilyfocus on those who do do not believe AI can work, or those who doubt thesingularity, or the potential of nanotechnology or other technologies. Onemay well disagree with Kurzweil on the specific details of the developmentof those trends, but many people beside him, including before him, havetalked about the singularity and said similar things. Of the fact of anapproaching singularity, there is likely little doubt it seems, even asone can quibble about dates or such. But the very nature of a singularityis that you can't peer inside it, although Kurzweil attempts to do soanyway, but without enough caveats or self-reflection. So, what RayKurzweil sees in the mirror of a reflective singularity is ultimately areflection of -- Ray Kurzweil and his current political beliefs.

The important thing is to remember that Kurzweil's book is aquasi-Libertarian/Conservative view on the singularity. He mostly ignoresthe human aspects of joy, generosity, compassion, dancing, caring, and soon to focus on a narrow view of logical intelligence. His antidote to fearis not joy or humor -- it is more fear. He has no qualms about enslavingrobots or AIs in the short term. He has no qualms about accelerating anarms race into cyberspace. He seems to have an significant fear of death(focusing a lot on immortality). The real criticisms Kurzweil needs toaddress are not the straw men which he attacks (many of whom are beingproduced by people with the same capitalist / militarist assumptions hehas). It is the criticisms that come from those thinking about economiesnot revolving around scarcity, or those who reflect of the deeper aspectsof human nature beyond greed and fear and logic, which Kurzweil needs toaddress. Perhaps he even needs to addres them as part of his own continuedgrowth as an individual. To do so, he needs to intellectually,politically, and emotionally move beyond the roots that produced the veryeconomic and political success which let his book become so popular. Thatis the hardest thing for any commercially successful artist or innovatorto do. It is often a painful process full of risk.

Ultimately, Kurzweil's book just exhorts us to do more of the same in theUSA we have been doing for decades (centralization of decision making,lack of regulation, market driven innovation) and things will come out asbest that they can. He ignores, for example, the rise of the multinationalcorporation over the past 100 years as an amoral entity with human rightsbut not human responsibilities -- the results of which show how muchdamage such megascale artificially intelligent entities can produce ifcreated and then left to operate unchecked. No wonder the Wall StreetJournal or the New York Times and the mainstream press gives his book suchglowing reviews. That celebration of current US elite cultural ideology isa denial both of history and current day trends, when, for example, theusually unacknowledged fact in the USA that populations in most otherindustrialized countries are healthier and happier than in the USA.http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=108&subsecID=900003&contentID=253543http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3157570.stmhttp://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1503

I do not intend to vilify Kurzweil here. I think he means well. And he iscourageous to talk bout the singularity and think about ways to approachit to support the public good. His early work on music equipment and toolsfor the blind are laudable. So was his early involvement with Unitariansand social justice. But somewhere along the line perhaps his perspectivehas become shackled by his own economic success. To paraphrase a famousquote, perhaps it is "easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needlethan a rich man to comprehend the singularity." :-) I wish him the best inwrestling with this issue in his next book.

--Paul Fernhout(Princeton '85, so "the pot calling the kettle black". A decade or so agoI might have written of similar solutions to ones your propose, beforemuch soul searching and exploratory reading in a variety of fields. As thecharacter Elwood P. Dowd says in the movie "Harvey", "My mother used tosay to me, 'Elwood' -- she always called me Elwood -- 'Elwood, in thisworld you must be oh-so clever, or oh-so pleasant.' For years I wasclever. I'd recommend pleasant -- and you may quote me." Perhaps goodadvice to live by when approaching a singularity driven in part byunlimited cleverness. :-)

A crisp and thoughtful post. Kurt, are you familiar with Karl Popper's critique of "historicism" -- the belief, central to Marxism and most other secular religions, that history is inevitably headed in some particular direction, which just happens to be the one that the believers think they want? Kurzweil et al. are simply the latest example of the same thing, and the Singularity as, ahem, inevitable as the glorious proletarian revolution.

'Technology' is a social construct. We should always ask, which technology, in whose interests? For example, I grew up visiting the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales. It was (and remains) a mini-utopia of heat pumps, windmills and passive solar design. It's 'high tech', but not the kind of high tech that Kurtzweil and associates necessarily regard as the future. From the perspective of grid-group cultural theory, developed by anthropologist Mary Douglas, there are always four possible futures, Individualist, Egalitarian, Hierarchist and Fatalist. Most of the Singularity proponents tend to be somewhat Individualist. In contrast, the alternative/renewable solar future crowd tend to be somewhat Egalitarian. I guess there might be four possible visions of the Singularity, of which the Individualist, Promethian version is only one.

"Singularity" is not an odd footnote in the story of human civilization. It is the primary purpose, the reason why we are here. We are being guided towards it with unerring precision.

Instead of singularity, I prefer to call it "Interface". We form a collective consciousness, and then it interfaces with the "God Consciousness".

The occult ruling class seeks to control all aspects of Interface. They believe they can harness the power of this interface for some nefarious purpose. Possible manifestations of this are illustrated in pop culture, in films such as the Matrix.

Pinning our hopes on technofixes and a transformative "singularity" gives us an excuse to dismiss the practical necessity to proactively impose limits on ourselves BEFORE reality (i.e. scarcities and strife) whacks us aside the head.

Isn't it interesting that Libertarianism is popular enough to merit a formal name, while the champions of a philosophy we might call "Responsibilitarianism" number so few that most people would consider the name itself absurd?

We are a nation of spoiled children, so accustomed to getting bigger and more extravagent toys every Christmas that we feel ENTITLED to a "better" Christmas every year...forever. The most popular "freedoms" we cherish are in fact variations on our fervent belief that we have a right to consume and emit without limits. (For example, most Americans see freedom of movement as the right to drive whenever, wherever, and as much as we want, in a vehicle as large as we can obtain on credit - and then park for free!)

One thing that came to mind as I read this fine essay (and I am certainly not the first to make this observation) was that humanity isn't mature enough to use technology responsibly, certainly not the planetary-scale technologies that are supposed to realize our Glorious Technological Future. The atom was never limited to "peaceful" use, and never will be. Same for just about everything else you can think of. What's more, nearly every day we read about how new technologies are being hijacked for military use. "Regulation" never has, and never will, stop power-mad people from abusing technology. I just don't envision a good ending here.

If you think I'm smoking something, then perhaps you can offer a rational explanation of how exactly the flagellum motor came into existance.

Explain how the individual parts evolved randomly when the motor requires all parts to be present in order to function. Explain how evolution of such a device can occur when natural selection is not possible because the design either works or it doesnt. (You cant naturally select a binary trait.)

When you fail to find such an explanation, you are forced to conclude that the design was specifically placed into our evolutionary equation. Certainly placed by an advanced civilization with god-like properties. But certainly not from "god" himself/herself/itself. After all, what would god want with a motor? (To quote Captain Kirk, "What does god need with a starship?")

Obviously, whoever designed the flagellum motor was not God, and was not human. Now, stick that in your pipe and smoke it.